Some ladies wore bombazines, or a silk and cotton stuff made at Norwich, and bone lace made at Honiton, both at that time the newest of English goods, although before made in Flanders; and they imported Italian lace and Venetian shoes, stuffed their stomachers with bombast, and wore a frontlet on their French hoods, called a _bongrace_, to keep their faces from sunburn. Cambric they brought from Cambrai in France, and calico from Calicut in India--the world was hunted high and low for spoil to deck these gorgeous, stiff, buckramed people, so that under all this load of universal goods one might hardly hope to find more than a clothes prop; in fact, one might more easily imagine the overdressed figure to be a marvellous marionette than a decent Englishwoman. [Illustration: {Four women of the time of Elizabeth}] [Illustration: {Two women of the time of Elizabeth}] Falstaff will not wear coarse dowlas shirts, dandies call for ostrich feathers, ladies must have Coventry blue gowns and Italian flag-shaped fans; everybody is in the fashion from milkmaids to ladies of the court, each as best as they may manage it. The Jew moves about the streets in his long gaberdine and yellow cap, the lady pads about her garden in tall chopines, and the gentleman sits down as well as he may in his bombasted breeches and smokes Herbe de la Reine in a pipe of clay, and the country woman walks along in her stamell red petticoat guarded or strapped with black, or rides past to market in her over-guard skirts. Let us imagine, by way of a picture of the times, the Queen in her bedchamber under the hands of her tiring-women: She is sitting before a mirror in her embroidered chemise of fine Raynes linen, in her under-linen petticoat and her silk stockings with the gold thread clocks. Over these she wears a rich wrap. Slippers are on her feet. In front of her, on a table, are rouge and chalk and a pad of cotton-wool--already she has made up her face, and her bright bird-like eyes shine in a painted mask, her strong face, her hawk-like nose and her expressionless mouth reflect back at her from the mirror. Beside the rouge pot is a Nuremberg egg watch, quietly ticking in its crystal case. One of the women brings forward a number of attires of false hair, golden and red, and from these the Queen chooses one. It is a close periwig of tight red curls, among which pearls and pieces of burnished metal shine. With great care this wig is fastened on to the Queen's head, and she watches the process with her bright eyes and still features in the great mirror.